November 2011 archive

The next wave in office buildings? (Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)

Facebook started with just a few friends in a Harvard dormroom. Google got going in a California garage. Could the next great tech company begin on a boat? Maybe, if a company called Blueseed gets its way.

Its founder, Max Marty, believes that US immigration laws are stifling entrepreneurs from other countries, so he plans to buy a ship and anchor it in international waters off the coast of California. He hopes that up to a thousand developers could live and work just 20 kilometres offshore, commuting via regular ferries to the mainland for meetings with clients and investors.

A squid-inspired robot that can limbo under small gaps could help rescue workers safely explore earthquake-hit areas or toxic waste spills.

"The squid is our hero, squids do incredible things," says George Whitesides, who led the group building the robot at Harvard University. Squid tentacles are essentially long tubes of liquid surrounded by muscles that squeeze the liquid to provide motion. Whitesides' soft robot mimics this principle with a body made from flexible plastics powered by a simple pneumatic system that uses air to curl its four limbs or arch its back. These cheap materials make the robot essentially disposable, meaning that it would not need to be recovered from a hazardous environment.

Whitesides had previously used a similar system to create a soft robot hand capable of picking up an egg, but his new creation focuses on moving rather than gripping. The squidbot can walk with a variety of gaits and is also able to squeeze under a two centimetre gap by undulating its body like a limbo dancer, as shown in the video above.

The robot is currently limited by a tail of attached cables that provide the air needed to make it move, but larger versions could be completely mobile. "It's going to be very straightforward to make bigger ones that have an on-board gas source," says Whitesides. Details of the robot were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Do you always struggle to reach the platform in time when catching a train? Then how about a platform which comes to your house before catching up with a non-stop high-speed locomotive?

That's the idea behind Moving Platforms, a transport concept dreamt up Paul Priestman, director of British design group Priestmangoode.

The high-speed train would run non-stop between two ends of a
continent, such as from Los Angeles to New York, never actually entering
cities or towns. Instead, a network of trams would carry passengers out
of the city to a line outside.

Next month will see the Japanese release of the PlayStation Vita, Sony's successor to its handheld PlayStation Portable console, ahead of a worldwide launch in February next year. How does the Vita match up to rival Nintendo's 3DS? And can portable consoles compete in a world of smartphone gaming? New Scientist went hands-on with the device at an event in London earlier today to find out.

The Vita is slightly bigger than the original PSP and dwarfs even the largest smartphones thanks to its 5-inch touchscreen, but its size has allowed Sony to cram in plenty of technology. The overall philosophy seems to be "why have one, when you could have two?" - the aforementioned touchscreen is complemented by a touchpad on the back, cameras adorn the front and rear, and the PSP's single analogue stick now has a twin.

There is even more under the hood, with a gyroscope, accelerometer and electronic compass providing a full range of motion controls, while GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth radios promise to keep you located and connected. Essentially, the Vita combines everything you'd expect from a modern smartphone - except a phone - with the controller from its big brother, the PlayStation 3.

A few months ago, we reported that a Yahoo team planned to test the six degrees of separation theory on Facebook. Now, Facebook's own data team has beat them to the punch, proving that most Facebook users are only separated by four degrees.

Facebook researchers pored through the records of all 721 million active users, who collectively have designated 69 billion "friendships" among them. The number of friends differs widely. Some users have designated only a single friend, probably the person who persuaded them to join Facebook. Others have accumulated thousands. The median is about 100.

To test the six degrees theory, the Facebook researchers systematically tested how many friend connections they needed to link any two users. Globally, they found a sharp peak at five hops, meaning that most pairs of Facebook users could be connected through four intermediate people also on Facebook (92 per cent). Paths were even shorter within a single country, typically involving only three other people, even in large countries such as the US.

Sociologist Stanley Milgram, who tested the six degrees theory in the 1960s, found an average of 5.2 intermediate people in the US. At the time, he wrote that people at the end points were "not five persons apart, but 'five circles of acquaintances' apart." He thought of them as different "worlds" of acquaintances." Now, the Facebook team concludes, "people are in fact only four worlds apart."

The future of augmented-reality technology is here - as long as you're a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say.

The first version may only have one pixel, but higher resolution lens displays - like those seen in Terminator - could one day be used as satnav enhancers showing you directional arrows for example, or flash up texts and emails - perhaps even video. In the shorter term, the breakthrough also means people suffering from conditions like diabetes and glaucoma may find they have a novel way to monitor their conditions.

In February, New Scientistrevealed the litany of research projects underway in the field of contact lens enhancement. While one company has fielded a contact lens technology using a surface-mounted strain gauge to assess glaucoma risk, none have built in a display, or the lenses needed for focused projection onto the retina - and then tested it in vivo. They have now.

"We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radiofrequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit," says a US and Finnish team led by Babak Praviz of the University of Washington in Seattle.

"This verifies that antennas, radio chips, control circuitry, and micrometre-scale light sources can be integrated into a contact lens and operated on live eyes."

Siri, the new voice-controlled assistant software installed on the iPhone 4S, already sends emails, checks the weather and performs other Apple-sanctioned tasks, but now Pete Lamonica, a software developer in St. Louis, Missouri, has come up with a hack that lets him create custom commands.

His system lets you use Siri as normal, except that all commands pass through a proxy server. Apple's official Siri servers interpret voice commands as usual, but the proxy server intercepts the returning text, making it possible to create plugins that run custom commands. For example, Lamonica hooked up Siri to his wirelessly controlled thermostat, letting him ask for the current temperature or set a new one.

Full-disc encryption is good at keeping your computer secure. So good, in fact, that it's got digital CSI teams tearing their hair out.

Computer security engineers, including a member of the US Computer Emergency Response Team, are complaining in a research paper this week that crooked bankers, terrorists and child abusers may be getting away with crimes because it is proving impossible for digital investigators to unlock their encrypted hard drives. As New Scientist related in February, full-disc encryption is a major consumer security leap. It scrambles everything on a drive when you turn off your computer, time out or log out. But the flipside, of course, is consternation for some crime fighters.

By offering a £1 million prize, the eleven blue chip companies funding it hope to spur innovation and reward the successful appliance of science in solving the world's over-arching problems, such as combating climate change. It will awarded every two years from 2013 for "outstanding advances in engineering that have created significant benefit to humanity".

According to some political commentators, Occupy Wall Street is the left's answer to the Tea Party - driven by a similar anger towards elites. But the social networks of people tweeting about the two movements suggest that they have rather different dynamics.

Those tweeting about the Tea Party emerge as a tight-knit "in crowd", following one another's tweets. By contrast, the network of people tweeting about Occupy consists of a looser series of clusters, in which the output of a few key people is being vigorously retweeted.

The Occupy network also has many casual unconnected tweeters, shown to the bottom right of the diagram below. Whether Occupy takes off as a coherent movement may depend on its success in bringing these potential recruits into the fold.

A new type of sensor can continuously monitor your heart rate without actually touching you.

The chip, known as the Electric Potential Integrated Circuit (EPIC)
biosensor, is essentially a super-sensitive digital voltmeter which can
measure tiny changes in electrical fields around all muscles and nerves.

The final product will be integrated into hospital beds, from where it will unobtrusively monitor a patient's vital signs, doing away with pesky tubes, leads and wires. It can track movement not only in heart muscles, but also muscles in the lungs, limbs and eyes.

The sensor's special twist is a filtering technology which isolates and spits out the exact measurement you want. So, if you're looking for eyeball movements, the sensor will comply, without confusing you with an ECG reading.

Bored in retirement, legendary aerospace engineer Burt Rutan is working on a new project, a high-speed winged boat that can double as a seaplane, so he can fly between lakes and rivers near his new home in Coeur d'Alene, a lakeside resort in northern Idaho.

Famed for designing a series of innovative aircraft and spacecraft, Rutan began building planes of his own design in the late 1960s while working as a project engineer for the US Air Force. He founded Scaled Composites in Mojave, California in 1982, where he became famous for designing Voyager, the first plane to fly around the world without refuelling in 1986. More recently, Rutan designed a flying car, which got off the ground for the first time in July.

Simply adding "_nomap" to the name you've given your domestic WiFi network will prevent Google Maps-equipped cellphones using your home as a position fix, Google announced last night. The idea is to allow people the chance to opt out of helping provide Google's commercial positioning service - even though doing so is likely to degrade its accuracy.

If you like puzzling over the meaning of the Nazca lines in southern Peru, crop circles in central England or poring over maps of Area 51, then you'll like this. Digital mapping fans today noticed some wild and wacky forms of indeterminate function in China's barren wastes in the Gobi desert.

A new iPhone app that lets you spot leopards, elephants and other animals in the wild could also help conservationists identify new species or determine whether populations are under threat.

The Instant WILD app, released today by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), connects users to motion-sensitive cameras set up near animal habitats in Kenya, Sri Lanka and Mongolia. New images are sent to the app in real-time when a camera senses a nearby animal, which then tasks users to pick which species it belongs to. You can also follow a specific camera to get alerts whenever a new image is captured, or access a version of the app online.

It would normally takes days for a conservationist to sift though these animal images, but ZSL hopes that crowdsourcing the results will help speed up the work. "By asking people to help us identify species through
the app, we are turning wildlife conservation into the massive team effort that
it needs to be," says ZSL conservation director Jonathan Baillie.

Urban beekeeping is taking off amongst those with a back garden or roof terrace, but why should high-rise apartment dwellers be left out? That's the thinking behind Philips' urban beehive design, which lets you stick a swarm in your living room.

The sleek hive comes in two pieces that attach through a hole in a window. The outside part provides an entry into the main hive and holds a flower pot for the bees to gather pollen, while the inside contains honeycomb frames ready for the bees to deposit their wax. An orange glass shell filters light, only letting through the wavelengths bees use for sight, and a pull cord at the base releases smoke to calm the bees before opening the hive to gather honey.

It is certainly an attractive design that could help boost declining bee numbers, but don't expect to see them adorning skyscraper windows any time soon - the hive is just a concept drawn up by Philips as part of its Microbial Home project, which looks at the possiblity of turning the home into a "domestic ecosystem". Indoor beehives also seem unlikely to get past health and safety checks - what happens if the bees get loose?

The loudspeaker design is based on Apple's iPod Shuffle (Image: Jonathan Banks/Rex Features)

Remember the first iteration of the diminutive iPod Shuffle, which attached like a tie pin to your clothing? Now Apple is patenting a similarly sized clip-on device - but rather than being a solid-state media player this one is a small piezoelectric loudspeaker for plugging into iPods, iPhones and iPads.

While a number of third party suppliers make clunkier add-on loudspeakers for iDevices, one aim of Apple's US patent application, which was filed today, is to provide an on-the-move sound source with an "aesthetically-pleasing appearance".

Smartphones let you do almost everything over Wi-Fi, so why do we still have to use up cellular minutes when making a call? That's the thinking behind Republic Wireless, a new hybrid phone network that lets you seamlessly make calls using any available Wi-Fi hotspot, falling back to the regular cellular network when you move out of Wi-Fi range.

The company estimates that most people are near a Wi-Fi network 60 per cent of the time, whether that be your home, work or the local coffee house, but it might not be suitable for those who like to roam further afield - rely too much on the cellular connection and you'll receive a warning before eventually being booted off the network.

It is a nice idea, especially if you are after a cheap smartphone - the initial cost is $199 for a modified LG Optimus phone running Android, followed by a $19 monthly charge. There is no minimum contract tie-in as with most other networks. You can't yet use your existing phone, though the company says it hopes to allow this in the future as well as providing a range of other handsets.

But is hotspot availability in the US good enough for the hybrid plan to work? Running data-hungry smartphones on Wi-Fi makes much more sense than the ageing cellular network, which was never designed to stream movies or download the latest apps, but it does rather reduce the mobility of your mobile phone.

Audiophiles who spend hours tweaking their speakers now have a new laser-based tool to help perfect their setup. The key to a great-sounding hi-fi is avoiding dead spots, the points at which sound waves overlap and cancel each other out. These can be caused by incorrect speaker placement, but they also occur when a single speaker plays mid-range frequencies and sound from the two parts of a speaker, known as the woofer and tweeter, interact.

Speaker manufacturers currently detect these dead spots by performing microphone tests in the space around the speaker, which is a time-consuming process, or computer simulations, which can prove inaccurate. Now, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London, UK has come up with an alternative that takes advantage of the way light changes as it passes through sound waves.

Researchers at NPL shone a laser vibrometer, which measures tiny vibrations, past the front of a speaker and then bounced the light back with a reflecting surface. Light waves change their phase when reflected and interacting with sound waves can affect this change because light travels faster in lower-pressure air. The laser vibrometer can pick up the differences, letting the researchers map out the sound waves and track down the dead spots.

The encryption protocol called Triple-Data Encryption Standard, or
3DES is supposed to be unbreakable - at least not without a lot of computing time
and power. Because of this, lots of contactless smart cards - London's Oyster Card, as well as cards used to store money and passes for mass transit systems in Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere - rely on 3DES to protect users' accounts.

But Christof Paar at Ruhr-University Bochum has led a team that hacked 3DES using a low-cost system to break in with just a few hours of work.

The team's method, called side channel analysis, is a lot like a safecracker listening for the clicks in an old-fashioned combination lock, or feeling for the catch in a combination padlock. Using a small probe, an RFID reader and an oscilloscope, the team measured the power consumption of the chip embedded in the card used while encrypting and decrypting its data, which allowed them to crack the code.

This allowed the team to make duplicates of the cards. The equipment, Paar says in a paper originally presented at the Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems in Japan last month, isn't all that expensive - about $3000, well within the reach of a criminal gang.

The manufacturer of the cards, NXP, says it is aware of the vulnerability and is recommending that customers upgrade to newer versions of the cards, as it had planned to phase out the version Paar and his colleagues worked on by year-end. The company says it had planned the upgrade before Paar's lab alerted them to the attack.

Hacking a transit card isn't all that lucrative, but subway rides aren't the only kind of contactless card out there. Visa and MasterCard use a system called payWave, also manufactured by NXP. Those could be hacked as well in a similar fashion. A similar type of attack was demonstrated on digital car keys in 2008, but this is the first time anyone has shown that a real-world system is vulnerable.

And while NXP says it will cease making the model of card that the German team hacked, it won't change instantly - transit systems take some time to "recycle" cards (as people renew or lose them) and credit card companies also don't act instantly. So odds are if you are carrying a contactless card with an NXP chip, it will be an older model for at least a few months.

The controller for Nintendo's new console, the Wii U, combines a touchscreen with buttons and analogue sticks to create an interface that's a cross between a tablet and more traditional gaming systems. Players will also be able to use their old Wii remotes, but a recently published patent application suggests these may also be getting an upgrade with the addition of a touchpad.

Current Wii remotes contain an infrared (IR) sensor that detects the position of an IR beam mounted on your television - that's what lets you point and click at objects on the screen. Nintendo's patent describes a touchpad add-on that slips over the existing remote and uses the IR sensor in a similar way.

Players touch the pad with an IR stylus, the light of which is reflected off a half-mirror angled towards the IR sensor, which detects the stylus' position. The half-mirror means the Wii remote can also be used normally, as TV-mounted IR beam will still get through to the sensor. The patent also suggests that the touchpad could also be illuminated when pressed by a player's finger, eliminating the need for a stylus.

Find it a struggle to remember your password? Then you're in luck - researchers have developed a new kind of login that relies on the fallibility of human memory to prevent phishing attempts at stealing your account details.

One common anti-phishing technique is SiteKey,
which requires users to choose an image and a message when they sign
up. These are stored in a secret file on your computer and displayed
when you enter your username, providing reassurance that you
are on the legitimate site, rather than a lookalike set up by a phisher,
and are safe to enter your password.

Great - except previous studies have shown that 92 per cent of
people will still login when their secure image is missing. That's why
researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have come up with an
alternative system called PhorceField that makes it almost impossible to login without viewing the correct images.

It's like finger painting, only without the messy paints. Pressing a sensor on paper printed with colour-changing inks could bring extra interactivity to books and wallpaper.

Adding stiff wires and LEDs to a sheet of paper is one way to create colour-changing paper. But Kohei Tsuji and Akira Wakita, both at Keio University in Japan, wanted to create the same effect without affecting the paper's softness and flexibility.

They printed colour-changing inks on one side of a sheet of paper and painted conducting pastes to make an electric circuit on the other side. Touching the paper activates a copper pressure sensor taped on the back of the paper. This sends electricity through the painted silver wires, which warms electrodes made from carbon paste. Heat radiates through the paper to the colour-changing ink on top.

A new Kinect hack places virtual objects anywhere in the real world and lets you interact with them as if they were actually there.

Most Kinect hacks just use a single version of the sensor, but a team at Microsoft Research has used four ceiling-mounted Kinects to map an entire room and the objects inside it in full 3D. A handheld projector acts as a flashlight that lets you peer into this virtual version of the world to reveal hidden images or draw in 3D space.

This close link between the real and virtual world allows for some impressive interactions, such as creating virtual copies of real objects or generating a stream of virtual particles on a desk and watching them roll inside a real-life drawer.

The project is unlikely to become a commercial product any time soon, but it's easy to imagine how a more polished version could lead to a holodeck-like environment in the comfort of your own living room.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth receivers already make it easy to send information from one phone to another, and handsets equipped with near field communication (NFC) technology will soon let you pay for a coffee with a swipe of your phone, but how can you be sure that no one else is listening in?

There's always the risk with any wireless communication that an eavesdropper will intercept your message, so encryption is a must, but that means securely exchanging an encryption key beforehand. The current solution often requires users to manually enter a key - think pairing two Bluetooth devices with a four-digit code - or simultaneously press a button on both devices, but this exchange could also be snooped on by a determined attacker.

Now researchers at the University of Trieste, Italy say they have come up with a colourful solution that can't be intercepted. Eric Medvet and colleagues have encoded the encryption key as flashes of colour on the screen of one phone that are picked up by the camera of another, in a system they call Rainbow Crypt.

They place the phones in direct contact to ensure that no one else can see the flashing colours. Phone cameras are not normally designed to focus at such a short range, but it is possible for them to pick up a single block of colour. Medvet says a five-second sequence is enough to transmit a 42-bit encryption key.

The video above gives you an idea of how this would work, though in a real-life situation the receiving phone's screen would of course be blanked out. The team will present their work at the Intelligent Systems Design and Applications conference in Córdoba, Spain at the end of the month.

A misplaced laptop filled with confidential data is a classic data security breach, with the potential to cause huge embarrassment and financial loss. Encryption is one way to protect your data, but given enough time and ingenuity there is always the risk that a laptop thief could decrypt your drive. An alternative is to store all of your files on a remote server using something like Dropbox, but that means trusting your cloud service provider to not take a peek at your data.

Now, researchers have come up with a third option that offers the best of both worlds. Their system, dubbed "Cloud Shredder", splits files into two pieces that must be combined before use. Files are invisibly split when placed in a Dropbox-style folder, with one part stored on your local hard drive, while the other is sent to the cloud. If your laptop is stolen, you simply delete the cloud part of your data and the thief is left with a hard drive full of junk.

One problem with the system is that users must always be online in order to access their files, but Nan Zhang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who helped develop Cloud Shredder, says this won't be an issue for long as mobile internet becomes ubiquitous.

Cloud Shredder currently works with Adobe Acrobat Reader and Open Office but Zhang says it could be easily be extended for use with other document software. He will present the system at the Frontier of Computer Science and Technology conference in Changsha, China later this month.

PETMAN bears more than a passing resemblance to an early-model Cylon. But an evil uprising is unlikely - PETMAN's humanoid shape is for testing clothing meant to protect soldiers from exposure to biological and chemical warfare agents. Because PETMAN can walk, crouch, kneel, and do push-ups and simple callisthenics, the robot can test gear for weaknesses more thoroughly than static dummies or partially mobile robots. It can also test conditions inside of the suit by simulating changes in temperature, humidity, and sweating.

PETMAN's quadrupedal cousins, BigDog and AlphaDog, are perhaps most famous for being able to react and recover from kicks and shoves that would send other robots sprawling to the ground. PETMAN is no different, staggering and balancing itself after light pushes. Early versions were based on the same basic design as BigDog, albeit with 50 per cent fewer legs. This latest version is more refined, with swinging arms, a more natural gait, and a distinctly humanoid shape.